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Saturday, 25 November 2017

What determines class? I would say it’s the language. If you
have to summon every ounce of your will power not to wince when someone uses a subjunctive
wrongly, you are probably middle class.

What about double negatives?

The litotes is of course a figure of speech, unique, I think,
to English, whereby an affirmative is expressed using a negative. When this
figure of speech is employed while speaking or writing, one uses double
negatives. Two wrongs might not make a right, but, in figurative speech, two
negatives, one succeeding the other, make a positive. Or do they?

Why would one want to use double negatives to express a
positive? Why not express the affirmative with the boldness of a teenager
parading lardy mid-riff and traumatised naval? Why be mealy-mouthed when you
want to express something positive?

The litotes use the double negatives as understatements, not infrequently, in an ironic manner. Many
a times, though, you feel that the double negatives are employed in a way that
makes the responses ambiguous at best. What does the answer “Not too bad” to
the question “How are you?” convey? Does it mean that the person is feeling “good”?
Or does it mean that the person is feeling bad, but not to a great degree, as suggested
by the adverb “too”? Are there degrees
of badness, then, from moderately tolerable to immoderately tolerable (also
known as intolerable)? The answer is often delivered with a smile. What does that mean? Is the person phlegmatically
surviving whatever badness that is afflicting him with quiet fortitude, showing
commendable self-restraint in the face of great adversity, which would send
many others to the Samaritans? It probably reveals nothing more than an
enchanting ignorance of figurative speech. In other words, it is something which
the people say, without giving it much thought, comfortable in the knowledge
that the person asking the question isn’t really bothered about the state of
your wellbeing and is making the inquiry as a nicety. That’s what polite,
middle-class people do when they meet other nice, middle-class people.

I am currently reading Rebecca Gowers’s excellent Horrible Words—A Guide to the Misuse of
English, in which Ms Gowers feels obliged to devote an entire chapter to
the double negatives. In it I came across an interesting example of double negative. The sentence is quoted from an article which appeared
in the Guardian (why does this not surprise me?) and goes like this: Few doubt that certain views pervade, and
practices persists, but even fewer will own up to holding or following them. The
sentence leaves you nodding your head in admiration at the
linguistic dexterity of the author.

Often, the double negatives are used, not as understatements
but, to emphasise a point, like Al Johnson, who announced in the Jazz SingerYou ain’t heard nothing yet, folks. This, I think, is not a
standard use of the double negative. Rebecca Gowers gives another example; of
Louis Armstrong, who declared: The music
ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. What was Armstrong
trying to convey when he said ain’t worth
nothing? If you use the rule of litotes, you might conclude that ain’t worth nothing means worth everything. But Armstrong follows
it with if youcan’t layit on the public
(that’s the third negative in the sentence). So, using the litotes mathematics,
you will conclude that Armstrong was saying that music is worth everything if you can’t lay it on the public. But that does not make much sense
either, because you get the feeling that what Armstrong is saying is the
opposite of what you might take him to be saying (if you apply the standard rule
of litotes to the sentence): The music ain’t
worth anything if you can’t lay it on the public. Does this imply that
Armstrong was simultaneously using another figure of speech, irony, conveying
the exact opposite of what he was saying? The same goes for Al Johnson’s
declaration in the Jazz Singer. What Johnson is telling the audience is that
the folks haven’t heard anything, yet when he says You ain’t heard nothing yet. Armstrong, arguably (or should it be
unarguably?), was a great jazz singer; but was the Pops’s grasp on the figures of speech as firm as his grasp on the
trumpet? I don’t know. Armstrong was perhaps using the double negatives in an
unorthodox manner to emphasize a point. Or, maybe, he didn’t know what he was
talking about. Or, he did know what he wanted to say, and chose to say it, out
of ignorance of the litotes, in a manner that Simon Heffer, in Simply English, described as vulgar. Or,
Armstrong didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about what Rebecca Gowers charmingly
refers to as “the gripers” thought about the misuse of English, and deliberately
used the double negative in this manner to express his contempt for the purists
and their dogmas. Or, Armstrong said what he said without giving much thought
to what he was saying; it was a slip of the tongue. We shall never know. Armstrong
died in 1971 and is not available, now, to explain.

This kind of use of double negatives, in a non-standard
manner, usually for emphasis, is more often heard or read, in my experience, in
American English. This was noticed and commented upon by Henry Mencken, the
great American satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English, in
his book The American Language. Mencken,
who once said he was inspired by the “argot” of the streets of Baltimore, considered
phrases such as I don’t see nobody,
or I couldn’t hardly walk as examples
of vulgar American English. (Mencken died in 1956. Had he lived longer, I would
not have thought he would have been impressed by the lyrics of some of the iconic songs that came out in the subsequent decades: I
can’t get no satisfaction (Rolling Stones) or I don’t need no education (Pink Floyd)).

There are examples of double negatives using pre-fixes such
as ‘ir’, ‘in’, ‘non’, ‘un’. We often read phrases such as ‘not insignificant’
or ‘not uncommon’, which do not jar our (at least my) sensibilities, although I
think it is neither necessary nor particularly stylistic. They are what I
consider to be straightforward uses of litotes to express affirmatives. You
might wonder whether such use isn’t (or should it be ‘is’?) pretentious. Occasionally, however, you come across words, which throw you. Take irregardless, which, when it is
used, appears to be used in place of the conventional ‘regardless’, and conveys the same meaning. Kingsley Amis, in his superb The King’s English (reviewed on this blog), railed against irregardless and
described it as a kind of illiteracy. According to Merriam Webster’s online
dictionary, ‘irreagrdless’ was popularised in American dialect in the early
twentieth century, and spread over other parts of English speaking world. The
dictionary informs that the word is not widely accepted and advises to use ‘regardless’
instead. For Rebecca Gowers, Amis, like Heffer, is a griper (she seems to use
this word to imply that Amis and Heffer are pedants and fussbudgets, which is
ironic, I thought, from an author who takes seventeen pages to discuss the
difference between slipslops and malapropisms in her highly readable Horrible Words—A Guide to the Misuse of English).
Gowers attempts to put forth her view, which, insofar as I can see, is ‘there
is no need, really, to hyperventilate about these things, which have been going on for centuries’ by giving convincing
examples which show that the words and word-usages scorned by the likes of Amis and Heffer
have been in usage for centuries (though not frequent), and not, as the "gripers" imply,
relatively recent addition to the lexicon, say in the twentieth century, by the philistine. 'Brothel', for example, once meant prostitute, and not its current meaning (although, regarding ‘irregardless’, Gowers can’t go further
back in time than 1865, and the example she comes up with is its American usage).

It seems to me that whether you will consider the use of a
word or a phrase or an idiom or a figure of speech as vulgar or cultured will
often depend on what appears right to your ears. It probably also depends on
what you think is the correct use of the word. I will always baulk at using ‘irregardless’
(‘regardless’ would do very nicely, thank you), but the word does exist, though
not so far in wide usage. It is also true that a catachresis, once it begins to
be used in spoken and written language regularly, is no longer a catachresis (a point Rebecca Gowers makes convincingly).

Coming back to double negatives, I think I shall carry on
using them (or, as Bart Simpson declared, “I won’t use no double negatives”) to
express an affirmative in a figurative manner, and not to emphasize a point,
the way many Americans do. Use of multiple negatives in a sentence is confusing,
if not vulgar, and is to be desisted.

Saturday, 28 October 2017

Nicolai Fyodorov (Fedorov, in English) was an obscure (in
the sense not very well known in the West in the twenty-first century)
nineteenth century Russian philosopher, who pontificated about the perfection
of the human race and, by extension, extension of human life. An idea Fyodorov
wrote extensively on was resurrection and immortality. Death and after-death
experiences, Fyodorov argued, must be examined scientifically.The mankind’s ‘common task’, Fyodorov
declared, was struggle against death. Continuation of human consciousness,
Fyodorov helpfully explained, need not happen in the same body—the outer
carapace, as we know, is imperfect, in any case—but the human existence can be
replicated by transplantation of consciousness into another form that controls
mind, and can be renewed infinitely. Sounds crazy? It probably is, in light of
what we know of the human biology today; but, I guess, in the nineteenth
century Russia, Fyodorov’s ideas were not dismissed out of hand. He even had
celebrity admirers, one of them Tolstoy.

Nicolai Fydorov’s transhumanistic (for the want of better
phrase) philosophy is the inspiration behind the literary thriller, Strange
Bodies, by the British novelist Marcel Theroux –the son of American
novelist, Paul Theroux.

The protagonist of Strange Bodies is Nicolas Slopen, an
academician and expert on Samuel Johnson. A man admitted to the secure unit of
the Maudsley mental hospital, referred to in the psychiatrists’ notes as ‘Q’,
claims that he is Nicolas Slopen. Indeed ‘Q’ was apprehended by the police for
stalking Slopen’s ex-wife and their children. It is, however, impossible that
‘Q’ can be Slopen, as Slopen had died in a road traffic accident several months
earlier. Yet, to the puzzlement of the psychiatrist, ‘Q’ seems to know many
details of Slopen’s life that are personal and unlikely to have been in the
public domain. The novel then tells the story of the real Slopen or the dead
Slopen. Slopen’s story begins a couple of years earlier, when he is hired by an
eccentric American music producer, Hunter Gould, to authenticate hitherto
unpublished letters of Dr Samuel Johnson, offered to him by a rich and dodgy
(is there any other type?) man (named Sinan Malevin), from Dagestan, which, the
novel informs, is a Russian Republic in the Caucasus. Slopen reads the Johnson
letters and comes to the not unsurprising conclusion that while the letters are
written in the unmistakable style of Samuel Johnson, they are forgeries. When
Slopen informs Gould of his conclusions Gould advises him to meet Malevin and
see for himself. So Slopen turns up at Malevin’s palatial residence in the
central London, where he meets the mysterious Vera, who is Russian and claims
to be Malevin’s house-help. In Malevin’s house further surprises await Slopen.
In the basement of the house he is shown a man who looks like the first cousin
of Jaba the Hut, but who speaks and behaves as if he were Samuel Johnson. Some
more time in the company of this man who is introduced as Vera’s brother—an
idiot savant—leaves no doubt in
Slopen’s mind that the man genuinely thinks that he is Samuel Johnson. This
‘discovery’ draws Slopen—who is going through a turmoil in his personal life,
namely his wife has informed him that she was shagging his rich friend behind
his back and has now decided to leave Slopen: the adulteress wants a
divorce—further into a web of intrigues, and into Russia, with the help of the
mysterious Vera, who is into it up to her nipples, but now wants out because
she has made a discovery of her own: she has conscience. In Russia Slopen
discovers the sinister plan (is there any other type?) some rogue Russian
scientists have conjured up in order to bring into reality the vision of Federov.
The only way to expose the skulduggery of the dastardly Russians is to create a
doppelganger of Slopen himself, using
the Procedure (which is never explained).(Why not use ‘Samuel Johnson’ to expose the Russians? I hear you asking.
It can’t be done for several reasons. Let me explain. Firstly, that would have
made the plot straightforward and deprived Theroux the opportunity to introduce
further twists in the plot, as also more philosophical pontifications on the
concept of self (very readable, I hasten to add); secondly, even if ‘Samuel
Johnson’ were available, it would have been difficult to convince the sceptical
media that he carried the consciousness of the original Samuel Johnson, the
original Samuel Johnson having been dead for more than two hundred years and
unavailable for close scrutiny; thirdly (and lastly), ‘Samuel Johnson’—the fake
Samuel Johnson, that is, although he is not strictly a fake, as he does carry
the consciousness of the original Samuel Johnson—is also dead (how convenient
is that?). By the way, he is no relation of Vera; he was just a convict picked
out of a Russian prisoner by the evil scientists involved in this sinister
project.) With the help of Vera, Slopen manages to have his consciousness
transplanted (if that is the word) into another Russian toerag. So there are
now two Slopens: the original Slopen, and the Russian toerag who also carries
Slopen’s consciousness and sensibilities. So far so good. All that remains now
is for the two Slopens to slip out of Russia, into the UK, and reveal
themselves as each other’s doppelgangers.
Quite how this would have proven to the sceptical public and media into
believing that the two guys were not just freaks who shared a delusion (or,
worse, con-artists), but were a proof, if proof be needed that the Russians,
despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, were up to no good, is not easy to
fathom. Perhaps Theroux wrestled with the same problem, and decided to
introduce another twist to the plot. Slopen—the original Slopen, that is—dies (or
is he bumped off?) and the doppelganger ends up in the looney bin because of
his extreme reluctance to part with the notion that he is Nicholas Slopen.

Strange Bodies is written in different forms, including a
psychiatrist’s notes on ‘Q’—Slopen’s doppelganger (a psychiatrist who is losing
her own grip on reality judged by the evidence), ‘Q’s memoir, and Slopen’s own
account. All the sections of the novel are well written, almost erudite at
times, although they all sound the same. (The memoir of the Russian toe-rag is
a tad unconvincing: in the opening sections of the ‘memoir’ the Russian toe-rag
and Nicholas Slopen travel together, and the ‘memoir’ leaves no doubt in the
reader’s mind that the toe-rag retains his original identity plus Nicholas
Slopen’s identity in his mind: in other words the doppelganger is fully and painfully aware that he is different from
Nicholas Slopen, and, in that sense, is not Nicholas Slopen. Is that what
Federov envisioned? On the other hand, it would be a fair guess that Federov
did not know what the hell he was talking about, and neither does Theroux.) Marcel
Theroux does have a way of telling a story that is nothing short of entrancing.
As you whizz through the chapters, you are engrossed by the story notwithstanding
the outlandishness of the plot. The novel, I must admit, is hard to put down
once you begin.

Is Strange Bodies a genre novel, a
science fiction thriller, or is it literary fiction? It doesn’t really matter;
however, for what it is worth, I think that Strange Bodies, while it
has the outer trappings of genre (science) fiction (like Kazuo Ishiguro’s
superb Never Let Me Go), at its heart it is literary fiction. Theroux
muses in the novel on what forms the core of humans, what makes us the unique
(in a narrow sense of the word) individuals that we all are. Theroux comes up
with the interesting and entertaining (if not wholly convincing) notion that
it’s language that makes us what we are: we are all made of words. The novel
brims with literary allusions, which Theroux liberally makes use of to
illustrate his point, from Milton to Nabokov to Assia Wevill, in a manner that
is not show-offy.

Strange Bodies, despites the silly plot, is an absorbing—at
times thought proving—a read. Give it a go.

Sunday, 15 October 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro said he was very surprised when he learnt
that he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature. They all are. I have
not come across any winner in recent times who, upon being informed that s/he
won the Nobel, responded, “I knew this. I knew I was going to win the Nobel. My
creative output has been of such a high calibre and I have been so consistently
superlative that I couldn’t see how the Nobel committee could think of anyone
else than me when it sat round the table to decide this year’s Nobel. Indeed
the only surprise is that I did not get it earlier.” That would be viewed as conceited.
So, while the true sentiment of the recipients might be “what took them so long
to realise my greatness”, they are hardly going to say that in public. For
example, novels of VS Naipaul, pre-2001, made it a point to mention that he had
won every possible literary award other than the Nobel. This suggests that at
the very least the Nobel was important for Sir Vidiya.

When the winners declare that they are very surprised at
receiving the award, what they probably mean is that they genuinely had no
inkling till they received the phone call to be informed that that they have
won the £ 800, 442 jackpot. So, (like Naipaul, probably) they might not be
surprised that they won the award and their inner reaction upon receiving the
news might be “about time”; the news itself probably is a surprise.

When Dorris Lessing won the Nobel in 2007 (I think), the
Nobel committee could not inform her straightaway; because Lessing was out, shopping
for weekly grocery in a local supermarket. The Nobel committee then released
the news of the award to the media, and reporters were waiting for Lessing at
her doorsteps when she returned from her shopping. I don’t know if the video of
Lessing’s reaction when she saw the gaggle of journalists in front of her house
is available on the YouTube, but her reaction suggests that she was genuinely
not expecting it (and also that she took the news of her triumph in her
stride).

VS Naipaul, who, in 2001, ended the long wait for the
British writers, by winning the Nobel twenty years after William Golding, was
in his house when the phone call came, but he apparently refused to take the
call, believing it was a prank or hoax.

In the English speaking world, at least, the media and
newspaper knew who the Nobel Laureate for this year was, when Ishiguro’s name
was announced. I have read that when JML Le Clezio, a novelist probably little
known outside of the building he lived in, in his native France, was awarded
the Nobel Prize in 2008, the sub-editors of the literary sections of newspapers
in the English speaking countries were scampering about to find any information
they could get on Le Cleizo. Ditto for Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who
was awarded the Nobel in 2011.

The Nobel committee over the years has been accused of
having regional, political and language biases while awarding the Nobel. Many
more European and Scandinavian authors and poets have won the award in recent
decades than those in the rest of the world. When the Europeans do not win the
award, usually it is someone who writes in English who is awarded the prize.
The former permanent secretary of the Nobel committee, Horace Engdahl, was
unapologetic about it. In 2008 he declared that Europe was still “the centre of
the literary world”. America, according to Engdahl, by contrast, was “too
insular and too isolative.” Engdahl was responding, if I remember correctly, to
the criticism, after the win of the little known JML Le Clezio in 2008, that a
distinct European bias was creeping into the awarding of Nobel and that
American authors were being deliberately ignored. Having read the literary
outputs of the recent Nobel winners, I am struck how the writing of at least
some of the European winners is so totally Eurocentric; indeed, if you were a
reader in, say, an African or Asian country, you would not get the nuances
unless you knew the historical as well as geopolitical context. Imre Kertesz,
who won the award in 2003, and Herta Muller who won it in 2009 are two
examples. Svetlana Alexievich, the Ukrainian born non-writer who was awarded
the Nobel in 2015, has written exclusively on the Soviet era issues. (It is
also true for non-European authors such as Mo Yan, the Chinese author who won
the Nobel in 2012.) So I am not sure what Engdahl meant when he said that the
Americans were insular. Did he mean the American writers were insular and
isolative, because they wrote about American culture? I saw it as a very unconvincing
attempt to justify what at that time was a very obvious anti-American bias. (Of
the Nobel winners I have read, VS Naipaul, Dorris Lessingand Mario Vargas Llosa were the only ones
(and, in case of Naipaul and Llosa, only in their later outputs) who, I felt,
wrote in their fiction about themes that transcended times and geography. And
now Ishiguro.)

At that time of Engdahl’s comment in 2008, no American
author was awarded the Nobel, after Toni Morrison won it in 1993. There would
be a further wait of eight years before an American was awarded the Nobel, in
2016. And that was Bob Dylon, who for months did not acknowledge any
communication from the Nobel committee. Not because Dylon was protesting,
insofar I could make out (unless this was Dylon’s way of letting the Nobel
Committee know that he was not overawed by the award). Dylon did not reject the
award (like Jean Paul Sartre did on the 1960s, or Pasternak did, under duress,
in the 1950s) because that would have given the message that the award was
important for Dylon. Dylon just did not take the calls (because he was touring)
and did not respond to letters (because he was touring). One must assume that
he knew that he had won the Nobel (unless he does not watch television or read
newspapers) but he did not think it was necessary to contact the Nobel
committee for months. The Nobel committee thought it was rude. It certainly was
priceless. I was practically weeping with hilarity when I read a piece in the
Guardian in which the spokesman for the Nobel carped about Dylon’s rudeness.

The Nobel committee, mercifully, did not have such trouble
in 2017, although Ishiguro’s land-line was consistently engaged when they
attempted to contact him. The committee released his name to the media, but,
unlike Dylon, they did manage to contact Ishiguro the same day. Ishiguro later
remarked, half-facetiously one assumes, that they were a bit cross at the
difficulty in getting in touch with him. The committee, however, would have to
admit that wait was not anywhere as long as it was in 2016.

Ishiguro is a safe choice. Notwithstanding the rather
strange reaction of Will Self (“He’s
a good writer, and from what I’ve witnessed a lovely man, but the singularity
of his vision is ill-served by such crushing laurels, while I doubt the award
will do little to reestablish the former centrality of the novel to our culture”—I
think what Self is saying here is that Ishiguro did not deserve the Nobel) most
have described him as a deserving winner.

Ishiguro is the
only novelist apart from VS Naipaul whom I had read extensively prior to his
Nobel win. Ishiguro is a good writer and I like him. Apart from The
Unconsoled (which I thought was a car crash of a novel; or, more
likely, I found it in accessible) I have loved all of his novels, in particular
Never
Let Me Go, which I think is outstanding. I also thought When
We were Orphans was excellent (I was surprised to hear Ishiguro
describing it as his least convincing novel in a literary programme; apaprently
his wife did not like the novel either). Then there is The Remains of the Day,
which probably is Ishiguro’s most famous novel, for which he won the Booker
Prize decades ago. His early novels are also well worth a read.

Ishiguro is more
than just a good writer. He is an excellent writer. Many of his novels deal
with memory, either individual or national or cultural; and how individual
memories can differ from the national memories to the point of delusion (which
I thought was explored very movingly in When We were Orphans).Although Ishiguro is not the only
writer to have done this (Salman Rushdie tackled this issue slightly
differently, and in his inimitable style in Midnight’s Children, in
my view), he has done it consistently in most of his novels (is that what Will
Self had in his mind when he talked about “the singularity” of Ishiguro’s
vision?).

Saturday, 30 September 2017

Burnice
Rubens once said that she was a very slow writer. She congratulated herself if
she wrote three good sentences in a day, and celebrated the momentous event by
playing a cello (many members of Rubens’s family were talented musicians). It
is therefore a testament as much to her tenacity as prolificacy that, by the
time she died in 2004 at the age of 76 (or 81, depending on which year you
believe she was born in—Rubens always said that she was born in 1928, but,
according to one obituary, she was actually born in 1923—) Rubens had published
twenty five novels and a memoir. Her first novel was published in 1960, and the
last in the year she died, which means Rubens published a novel on average
every two years. Rubens dealt with many genres in her novels. Her personal
favourite novel was Brothers, an epic saga of three generations of a Jewish family,
beginning in the tsarist Russia in the eighteenth century and continuing beyond
the Second World War She wrote a few more novels on this theme, including her last
one, The
Sergeant’s Story. However, Rubens’s lasting reputation rests on a
number of black comedies she wrote, characterised by her deadpan humour—pans
did not come deader than Rubens’s.

Birds
of Passage,
first published in 1981 (and later filmed for a television drama) tells the
story of two neighbours—Ellen and Alice—who, after they have been finally and
respectably widowed, go on a cruise together. They have been abiding patiently
for their respective husbands to do the decentthing and die without creating too much fuss. Neither of the husbands is
even once referred to with his first name—Alice’s husband is ‘Pickering’, while
Ellen’s is ‘Walsh’—, probably to emphasize their peripheralness in the lives of
the two protagonists, despite having been married to them for decades. Walsh
obliges and drops dead of a coronary one day. But Pickering, to the annoyance
of Ellen and embarrassment of Alice, carries on living. The two families also
share a hedge and it is the husbands’ responsibility to cut and trim it. One
hedge-cutter is dead, but the other continues with his duties. Pickering,
however, does not have the courage to trim the hedge on the Walshs’ side,
because he does not want to usurp his dead neighbour’s place in any way,
oblivious to the fact that this act of omission is making his dead neighbour’s
widow more and more resentful. Ellen has no choice really, then, to marry
again; and marry she does. Her second husband, Thomas—he, like the other two,
is only referred to by his surname—begins trimming the hedge, till, one day,
he, too, drops dead. This, even Alice silently agrees, is very unfair, and
begins wishing fervently for Pickering to pop his clogs. Which, he finally
does. After a decent period of mourning, the two widows, who, between them have
126 years, although none would confirm the individual contribution to this sum,
are ready to embark on a cruise. On the cruise they become part of a group,
which includes Mr. Barlow—recently widowed and going on the cruise to celebrate
the memory of his dead wife who, so he tells others, if she were alive, would
have accompanied him— and Mrs Dove—a widow, who has spent her recent years
entering various draws of crossword competitions, and, having been finally
rewarded with two tickets to go on a cruise, she has, much against her better
judgement, invited her daughter—another Alice—who is going through a midlife
crisis. The younger Alice’s husband has left her for another woman and she has
found succour in an aggressive lesbian. Alice (Dove) is an angry woman, and
although she has decided that she is angry towards men, she is also coming
round to accept that she not a lesbian. To this group attaches Wally Peters, a
bachelor in his mid-sixties with an impressive paunch and socially awkward
manners. Wally has never been in a serious relationship; indeed he may have
been a virgin. Amongst the crew is lurking a waiter, who has, during his
fifteen years of waiting on the cruise, successfully raped a number of single
women—age is no bar for our rapist; he is equally content to rape grannies as
well as younger women—without, incredible as It may seem, getting caught even
once. He has hypothesized, it would appear, successfully, that the bourgeois
pride of the women would stop them from reporting him to the purser; and he has
also surmised, again accurately, that some or more of them have probably not
been involved in bedroom gymnastics for a while and would actually welcome his
attention. The rapist zeroes in on the two widows—Pickering Alice and
Ellen—and, over the next ten days, that is the half of their cruise, rapes them
every night, having cleverly persuaded them to move into different cabins when
one couple—comprising a bossy woman and her henpecked husband—leaves the cruise
after the wife is publicly humiliated when, feeling sea-sick, she is caught
short. The sexual assaults have the diametrically opposite effects on the two
neighbours. While Ellen is consumed with rage she can barely contain—the waiter
has guessed that this would be the case, and has taken the precaution of taking
her nude photograph, hiding in the cupboard of her cabin when she was changing
clothes, which he uses to blackmail her—in Pickering Alice it leads to sexual
awakening. Neither of the women guesses that the other is also the object of the
waiter’s lust. Neither thinks, for different reasons, that the other would
believe, if told. The after-effects of the nightly (for Ellen) and pre-dawn
(for Pickering Alice) encounters are there for all to see. The once confident
Ellen becomes increasingly haggard and concocts various improbable schemes to
wreak her mighty revenge on the waiter (which culminates in her buying, while
spending a day in one of the ports, having gone to great lengths to dissociate
herself from her inquisitive group, a Swiss army knife!), Alice is aglow with
effulgence and is filled with hitherto unknown self-assurance which surprises
Ellen, though she still does not suspect the reason behind it. When Ellen can
bear it no longer, she tells the story of her nightly ordeals to the widower
Barlow—who, for all appearances is wooing Ellen in a manner that probably went
out of fashion before the First Great War—during a fancy dress competition (in
which Barlow appears as Mahatma Gandhi). Barlow, in turn opens his heart to
Ellen and confesses that his marriage was far from happy, at least not towards
the end, as his now-dead wife was having it off with another man; indeed the
two cruise tickets were bought by Barlow, as a perversely gentlemanly gesture,
for the two love-birds to go on a cruise in order to find out whether the two
really wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. As it turns out the
rest of Barlow’s wife was not long when she meets with a road traffic accident
while driving to give her lover the good news of the unexpected manna from
heaven—the cuckold is actually sponsoring their cruise—, and leaves for
presumably not heaven. Barlow is appropriately and suitably outraged when he
hears of the sexual assault, and promises to accompany Ellen to the purser
after the fancy dress competition is over. Just when Ellen is heaving a sigh of
relief that her aged loins would finally get respite from the nighttime
invasion, Barlow drops dead of a heart attack in the midst of the fancy dress
competition.At this stage the rapist makes
his first mistake. He decides to turn his attention to the other Alice, who, he
correctly guesses, would provide a spirited and vigorous resistance to his
amatory attentions—indeed the more resistant his victims are, the more they
fight, the more he is turned on; that is why the thought of raping the hostile
Ellen excites him more than having a sexual congress with the Pickering Alice,
who has willingly opened to him her inviting second lips as it were, and has
taken to putting on her best chiffon dress for what she has come to expect as
the nocturnal adventure—but, he incorrectly assumes, would yield herself to his
power eventually. As it happens, it is the waiter—he, too, like the rest of the
male characters save Wally—and even here we know only the diminutive—remains
nameless—who bites the dust, and Alice Dove drags him to the purser. The purser
does not believe her, but for the sake of propriety offers to investigate the
matter further if she lodged a complaint. Alice Dove decides not to lodge a complaint,
and the waiter, thanking his stars for the unexpected reprieve, decides to lie
low for the rest of the cruise. This has the opposite effect on the two
protagonists: Ellen regains her self-confidence, while Alice, feeling rejected,
goes back to being her mousy, dithering self. Just when it appears as though
the cruise would end without any further kerfuffle, Rubens has one last, and
not very pleasant, twist to offer.

Birds
of Passage
is a dark comedy. Dark subjects such as death and sexual assaults occur
repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in the novel; and are treated with terrifyingly
comic nonchalance. Yet, it is a testimony to Rubens’s greatness that at no
stage does she trivialise or downplay the sinisterness of what is going on. The
full horror of the rapaciousness of the waiter’s assaults is laid bare for the
reader. As the novel progresses, the increasing helplessness and futile
agitation of Ellen, while depicted in an impassive manner, is full of pathos.
It is for this reason you feel distinctly queasy while smiling at Ellen’s
comically inept attempts to put an end to her nightmare. Alice Pickering, the
other protagonist, reacts very differently to the waiter’s ravishment, which,
in her, engenders wholly different feelings. Here, too, is pathos at work: that
a woman, who has avowedly enjoyed conjugal pleasures for decades, is actually
unfulfilled, and has to wait till she is sixty something and go through what
most would regard as acts of utter degradation in order to experience sexual
enjoyment, is somehow more sad than funny.

Birds
of Passage,
however, is not just a dark comedy. It is also an exquisite comedy of
manners.It is a story of bourgeois airs
and pretensions, the morbid secrets that lay hidden under an outwardly happy,
contented, middle-class, appearances. Nothing is, as it seems in the novel.
Ellen and Pickering Alice are united in their grandiose belief that they are
somehow special compared to the other women on the cruise because the waiter,
they think, has chosen only them for his attention, unwarranted in Ellen’s
case, and gratefully received in Alice’s case. It does not occur to them that
they are just cannon fodder to the waiter’s lust, and there is nothing remotely
special about them. Mr. Barlow, the devoted widower, has not enjoyed the happy
connubial bliss he leads everyone to believe. Supporting the main plot of the
narrative is the subplot involving the bachelor Wally and Mrs Dove, the mother
of the younger Alice. Rubens is at her toe-curling best, here. Both Mrs. Dove
and Wally are desperate to find a life-partner, and in a moment of rashness
which he soon comes to regret, the pompous, gauche and awkward Wally proposes
to Mrs Dove; and she, in a response that is as impulsive as his proposal (and
which she, too, would bemoan when sanity prevails) accepts him. Both realise in
no time that they have no intention of tying themselves into matrimony, but
continue with the charade for the rest of the cruise in order to save the
embarrassment to the other. The other members of the group cotton on to what is
going on between Wally and Mrs. Dove at different times and in different
circumstances.

Rubens
does not let the pace of the plot slacken at any time, and, when the reader is
least expecting it, gives a hundred watt jolt of surprise. Reading this novel
is like driving down a picturesque winding route, whereby, after a while, you
come to expect another surprise, but do not know whether it would actually
materialise or in what shape or form.

Birds
of Passage
finds Burnice Rubens, one of the best writers of her generation, in splendid
form. Buy it from a second hand book-shop, and read it.

Sunday, 17 September 2017

The linguistic department at University of York, after
months of painstaking research, has discovered more than two dozen words which
have gone out of fashion, but which, they feel, have so much relevance to the
current times that they ought to make a comeback.

Talking of the times we live in, in the UK, one might be
tempted to ask whether it is wise to spend tax-payers’ money on a bunch of
linguists who bury their noses for months in historical texts and old
dictionaries, and come up with a list of strange sounding words, which no one
has used in the previous two centuries, and which, should you use them in your
day-to-day discourse, would invite incomprehensible looks from the listener.
But that, I should guess, would be Philistine. I know a man who is employed by
the local council as an expert in medieval graffiti on the walls of the
churches and cathedrals in the county. For the last few years he is threatening
to publish a book on the subject which, he insists, is cruelly neglected and is
not in the consideration of hoi polloi, their minds addled by the latest
gizmos, carb-rich food, politics, holidays, music, clothes—anything that is not
mediaeval graffiti. The guy is the most dyspeptic, self-martyred,
whingeing person who ever breathed (and these are his good qualities), but he
has, I feel obliged to point out, a point. We all should have a higher reason for existence,
shouldn’t we? It can’t be about Apple X, holiday to Tenerife, watching gruesome
medical dramas on television, and night-outs with your mates, waking up the
next day with your knickers round your ankles (or over your head).

The chief investigator of the linguistic project, one Dr
Watt (probably not a real doctor) said, “As professional linguists and historians of English we
were intrigued by the challenge of developing a list of lost words that are
still relevant to modern life, and that we could potentially campaign to bring back
into modern day language.”

I
am with the good doctor (real or not) Watt on this. These days, campaigns seem
not to be about higher pursuits. They are about mundane issues: campaign
against homelessness, campaign for the victims of tragedies—natural or
man-made, campaigns for the rights of various oppressed and ill-treated
minorities, campaign against Israel (usually outside M & S, where you see
beardy types with placards, advising you to boycott Israeli avocados, as if that
is going to make the Israelis vacate Gaza), campaign to increase the already-overinflated salaries of public sector
workers (they are so special), campaign against Brexit, campaign for Brexit, campaign
to keep the libraries in Norfolk open, campaign for free tai-chi lessons
for the geriatrics, so on and so forth. Where is the charm in that? Campaign to
bring back words which, if you start using them, will make people worry you
have gone soft in the head—that’s what I want to see. It is regrettable that
art has to convince people that they need it (the mediaeval graffiti expert is a case in point), whereas it is taken for granted that the bloody NHS, the
bloody Fire Services, and the bloody police are bloody indispensable, and
people bloody well can’t do without them. It is unfair. Wouldn’t you prefer art
to life? In life you are surrounded by bores and rogues and schmucks. Life is littered
with mistakes, accidents, regrets and the eventual (inevitable) despair. You may start your life with whatever
ideology, you are going to end up damaged, disillusioned, and more bitter than
the lemon I squeezed in my gin last night. Art, on the other hand, is interesting,
satisfying and entertaining. And, if it isn’t, well, you can discard it and
take up another one. Can you do that with your life? To paraphrase Logan
Pearsall Smith, people say life is the thing but I prefer campaigning for lost
words rediscovered by the linguists in York. You would be hard put to find a
more campaign-worthy object than “a list of lost word that are still relevant
to modern life.”

Such pursuits are, in some ways, very middle-class. Nothing wrong
in that; not everyone is capable of finding relaxation and enjoyment in
shouting racist chants at football matches. If you are the type who finds fulfilment
from knowing about, say, the manifold similarities (and differences) amongst
the multitudes of translations of The Odyssey, or whether Robespierre really
kept his eyes open as the guillotine rushed towards his neck, or from spotting
the wrong use of the subjunctive (and the correct use of synecdoche), I have no
doubt that you will find that knowing obscure words from the past, newly
discovered by experts at York University, is a life-enriching prospect.

I don’t want to be labelled a momist (if you want to know
what this word means, you will have to read this post till the bitter end), and
I offer my unhesitating support to the linguistic project taken on by the folk
at York University. Ferreting out words and phrases long since fallen into
disuse (probably for good reason) is a very worthy activity. In terms of
providing entertainment, it may not overwhelm you with excitement, true, but
none of us can cope with (or even wish for) hair-raising psychedelic
experiences all the time, can we? Once in a while a quiet, relaxing day on the
massage-table of Basel hot-spring resort is what we need.

So what are the words the linguists from York University
have found?

One that immediately caught my attention was ‘betrump’.
Apparently it means ‘to cheat’ or ‘to deceive’. It may remain topical, as Dr Watt confidently predicts,
for the next couple of years, at least.

There are, I noticed, quite a few words in the list, which
throw into relief the baser instincts of humans.

A ‘quacksilver’ is a person who dishonestly claims knowledge
of medicine, and spreads false cures.

‘Coney-catch’ is not a noun. It is a verb with roughly the
same meaning as ‘betrump’. If you have been ‘coney-catched’ (or is it ‘coney-caught’?)
you have been duped. Deceived. Swindled. Cheated. Betrumped.
And you would be well within your rights to describe this person to the police
as a ‘nicum’ (except that they won't have a clue what you are on about).

Some of the words in the list are in usage today, but, looks
like, in the bygone days, these words had very different meanings. ‘Teen’ was a
verb and its meaning was ‘to vex’ or ‘to irritate’ (I can see the links between
the current and the past use of the word). A ‘Percher’ was not an object for a
bird to alight on; a ‘percher’ was a person who aspired for a higher rank or
status.

I liked ‘Tremblable’, which means ‘causing horror or dread’,
and ‘Sillytonian’, which means a dunce.

What is a slug-a-bed? A slug-a-bed is a person who spends
long time in bed through nothing other than laziness.

‘Rouzy-Bouzy’, meaning ‘noisily and boisterously drunk’, is
another word that might find its way into current usage, without requiring a
campaign.

I was surprised to see a word in this list of ‘lost words’
which I knew the meaning of: ‘Hugger-mugger’, which means doing something
clandestinely, or in secrecy.

I thoroughly enjoyed going through the list of ‘lost words’.
Even if you think this is exactly the kind of nonsense for which Lenin shot the
bourgeoisie after the Bolshevik revolution, I suggest you give it a go and join
the campaign of Dr Watt, in the spirit of hyper-conformism. Who knows, you
might start enjoying it.

Thursday, 31 August 2017

I once heard the
British novelist Esther Freud in a literary programme. She was there to speak
about Lucky Break, the publication of which, I seem to remember Freud
telling the audience, was postponed by Harper Collins at her request, because
she wasn’t happy about certain sections of it. I can’t remember now whether
Freud read out an excerpt from her novel. In the question answer session (during
which one man asked—and I am not making this up—whether she would recommend
Morocco as a holiday destination seeing as she had spent some time in that country)
she talked about how many of her novels were inspired by her own life
experiences. (Afterwards, while taking copies of Hideous Kinkyand Pearless Flats to Freud for her
autograph, I asked her simperingly whether she had thought about writing a
novel about her illustrious family. Freud gave me a weary look. I was obviously not
the first (and wouldn’t be the last) to ask her this question. In a manner
befitting a class teacher trying her best to think of something encouraging to
say to the very keen pupil who is ten bricks short of a load in her class she
said that no, she had no intention of writing a novel about her illustrious
family.

Lucky Break is Freud’s seventh novel. It follows the
fortunes of a group of drama students over a period of 14 years, between 1992
and 2006. We first meet them as gauche and anxious teenagers, on their first
day at a drama school in London, run by a gay couple, one of whom is so
caricaturesquely tyrannical, he can’t be real. But perhaps he is. (Having
watched many real life cookery programmes, I have to accept that there are men
who are capable of going at the deep end over a bowl of soup; so it is not
inconceivable that there are men out there who take acting very, very seriously.)
Not all of the candidates make it to the final year. Those—mostly women—who the
gay tyrant thinks won’t cut the mustard are asked to leave, while some
others—mostly good looking young men whom the gay man is hoping to lure into his
bed—are allowed to complete the course. As the novel progresses Freud concentrates on
the ebb and flow of the careers of three of them: Nell—plainer than a Tesco
pitta bread—who is asked to leave at the end of the second year but refuses to
take the hint; Charlie—part Nigerian and part English—who is beautiful and
believes that it is only a matter of time before success finds her address; and
the handsome, ambitious Dan who marries Jemma, another reject of the drama
school, like Nell, who (unlike Nell) takes the hint and devotes herself full
time to raise Dan’s family.

In prose that is
simple yet elegant, marked by compassion, and flavoured with wry humour Freud
depicts for the reader a tableau of the lives of people who are wedded to
acting , and soldier on even as the passing years bring home the realisation
that they are probably not going to be the next Ian McKellen.There are several set pieces—such as Nell’s
encounter with a film director, hornier than a bunny rabbit on Viagra, or a
chronically drunk actor disappearing in the middle of a run of a
production—which, while they may not split your sides, will bring a smile to
your face. Very occasionally, though, such as Nell’s stint in Edinburgh with a
group of physically handicapped actors, it becomes too surreal.

Of the three main
protagonists Nell and Dan are blander than the Thursday night curry at the
Weatherspoon’s.Dan, for whom the gay
teacher at the drama school has high hopes, does not quite fulfil his
potential; and, despite occasional bit-parts roles in American sitcoms which
achieve a modicum of popularity, toils in the slow lane. He remains faithful to
Jemma and is devoted to their four children. Jemma, on her part, is phlegmatic
about the damning verdict of the drama school that she hasn’t got what it takes
to become an actress. You almost wish at times for them to stop being so bloody
reasonable and supportive, and yearn for them to have an almighty row, driven
by Jemma’s jealousy and Dan’s infidelity (it does not happen; these two carry
on being maddeningly reasonable). Charlie is in many ways the most interesting:
she is vain, conceited, self-centred, and driven.She is one of the few women students who are
allowed to complete the three-year course at the drama school, and, after
completing the course, her career appears to be taking off for a while; unlike
that of the dumpy Nell. As Charlie bags roles in sitcoms, Nell is flaps her
penguin’s wings in children’s shows in Northern towns (with name full of
combative consonants). Since the offers are far and few in-between,Nell is forced to wait at the local Pizza
Express, along with her flatmate, another struggling actress of Indian descent,
who is fed up of playing the young Asian woman forced into an arranged marriage
by her on-screen parents. Charlie remains friends with Nell, but it is an
unequal relationship, as Charlie remembers to phone Nell only when she is
having boyfriend troubles (and expects Nell to drop everything and rush to her
flat (and eat ice-cream tubs). It is Nell, however, who gets the eponymous
lucky break and stars in a blockbuster Hollywood film while Charlie’s career
stymies.As the novel ends, Charlie—much
to the reader’s disappointment—has meekly accepted the shift in her
relationship with Nell as the two women go for the London premiere of Nell’s
film. (Prince Charles and Camilla are two of the few real-life characters who
make a guest appearance in the novel.)

Lucky Break is a gentle and tender-hearted portrayal of
the world of the actors. The pace of the novel, like its prose, is sedate, and,
for a novel purporting to show the lives of actors—a profession that, it would
be fair to assume, has more than its share of narcissists—, it is somewhat lacking
in drama and grand gestures and tense standoffs. But Freud more than makes up
for it with astute observations, eye for the detail, and subtle humour.

I do not know how true
to life Lucky Break is. Freud was an actress—not a very successful one,
though; and, I read somewhere, a reject of a drama school—before she turned her
hand at writing; so one assumes that she has drawn upon her own experiences
when she wrote the novel.It is an
engrossing read, proof, if proof be needed, that you don’t have to cram your
novel with grand moments to make it readable. I liked it very much.

Sunday, 27 August 2017

In Anna Funder’s excellent Stasiland, is narrated a
powerful scene. A young East German woman falls in love with an Italian man in
a fare in Hungary (which, in the Soviet era, used to be one of the less
repressive Communist states). Unbeknown to the woman, the Stasi are following
her every move. One day the woman is summoned to see the local Stasi Satrap.
She is given an offer. She is to carry on with her relationship with the
Italian man, but as an agent of the Communist state. She is to ferret out information
from her boyfriend (who, the Stasi knows, holds no governmental position) about
the decadent Western culture and pass it on to the Stasi. The woman refuses.
She is asked to leave the Stasi office. Her visa to travel outside the GDR is
revoked immediately. She can no longer carry on with her clandestine
relationship with the Italian. She also finds it near impossible to find any
work. The woman has no choice but to register as unemployed and fall on the
state help. She is standing in the queue in the local centre of the town in
which she lives for the registration, and remarks to the person standing next
to her that she has tried hard but is simply unable to find work. A Stasi
minion, a woman, is passing by and overhears the remark of the young woman. The
Stasi woman is outraged, and screams at the young woman, “There is no
unemployment in the German Democratic Republic. If you are hardworking you will
find a job. It is because you are lazy you can’t find a job.” Unemployment and
unproductivity existed only in the West, not in the Socialist Utopia that was
the German Democratic Republic.

I have known no state in the world where Socialism has
delivered. As the joke goes, the Socialists always run out of other people’s
money to spend. And when that happens, the Socialist saviour invariably turns
into a despotic dictator: all dissent is suppressed; political opponents are
jailed; elections are rigged to centralise power into the hands of the
increasingly unpopular dictator.

That’s what is happening in Venezuela. The current Socialist
president, Nicolas Madura, has become a dictator. Madura might have come to power
democratically in 2013 (after Hugo Chávez, an inspiration for Saint Jeremy of
the UK, having started the economic meltdown of the country by reckless
spending of money the country was not going have forever, on extravagant social
projects, succumbed to cancer), but he has lost all moral right to govern.

To describe the situation in Venezuela as dire would be an
understatement. Madura’s Socialist regime has presided over the worst economic
crisis in Venezuela’s history. The inflation is running at 500%, and the
exchange rate is more volatile than a stroppy toddler’s mood swings. The
country is facing unprecedented food crisis. The hospitals are running out of
medicines.

It can’t be, because it could never be, the major said, when
he saw the giraffe. But it could be, and it is. How did this happen? What we do
know is: this happened under the watch of the Socialists who have run that
country for the best part of past two decades.

Venezuela is an oil-rich country. It is said to have the
highest reserves of oil in the world, more than the Saudis (though perhaps not
as accessible). Therein also lies the problem. Other than oil the country has
not invested in anything over decades.

During the presidency of Hugo Chávez, the oil prices were
astronomical ($ 100 per barrel). Venezuela cashed in on the boom, and dollars
flowed in. This engendered in Hugo Chávez delusions of grandeur. The man believed
he was the Socialist Messiah who was brought on this earth to free the world
from the Capitalist yoke. Chávez not just took a moral high-ground, he took a hot-air
balloon ride. Chávez, however, did not have the foresight to save for the rainy
day (remind you of someone? Here is a clue: he was the Chancellor of the
Exchequer for the UK for years and also (an ineffective) prime-minister: his
name starts with ‘G’ and surname with ‘B’), and spent money extravagantly on food
subsidies, and other social projects of questionable benefits. Then, to the
horror of the Venezuelans, the oil prices tanked. Chávez was, of course, gone
by then. His successor, Nicolas Madura, possessing the charisma of a boiled
potato, does not have Chávez’s ability to unite the country behind him and his
looney ideas.

Once the economy, dependent almost exclusively on oil
export, started going down the toilet and the government revenues began
dwindling, the Utopian projects started by Chávez became impossible to sustain.
This is the other problem with Socialist Utopias. It is impossible take issues
with them; and it is impossible to sustain them indefinitely.

During Chávez’s presidency, the prices of food and medicines
were dramatically reduced—no doubt to the delight of many in Venezuela at that
time (I know of no one who will push away free lunch)—to the point (and this is
where the Socialist madness comes in) where the price at which these items were
sold was less than the cost of producing them. Chávez, the Socialist Santa
Claus, said, “Don’t fear; I am here. I shall subsidise all the basic items. The
oil bonanza will go on forever, and we are all going to roll in wealth till the
end of times.” Chávez requisitioned all the private companies in Venezuela (an
obsession with all Socialist and Communist nut-jobs, a variant of which is
nationalisation of industries—Socialists are very keen on it). Finally, Chávez
restricted access of American dollar into Venezuelan economy to stop people
converting bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, into dollars. Like all the
Socialist dictators Chávez hated the Great Satan, and was incensed that many
Venezuelans still had what he obviously considered was a pathological need for
financial security, which they sought in the American currency.

There came a point, as it was ineluctably going to come,
when the Venezuelan companies could no longer afford to produce goods. The
Venezuelan government started importing all the commodities from abroad. How
was it planning to pay for it? From oil money, of course. You don’t need to be
a Harvard economist to figure out what happened next. The price of oil is lower
than crocodile’s piss (a barrel of oil currently costs less than $ 40). The
Socialist government can no longer sustain its outlandish (and unwarranted) subsidies
and other profligate programmes, and the bolivar (which is about as much worth
as the dollar—the Zimbabwean, not American—so worth nothing) can’t pay for the
required imports. So, on to the next step—as inevitable as the yearly floods in
the Bangla Desh basin—the rationing of food and other basic commodities, which
are disappearing from the shops, and are ending up in the black market at
prices reaching the current national economy of the beleaguered country.People, who still have jobs and are earning
wages in bolivar, which has lost its value, are barely able to keep themselves away
from starvation. The rest are roaming the streets searching for foods in rubbish
bins, before they start frying their children.

Some Socialist Utopia.

In April 2017 Madura announced a 35% rise in the salaries of
Venezuelans—the 15th such increase he has announced since he came to
power four years ago. Seeing as Venezuela can no longer produce anything (other
than oil, for which there is little demand) and the current exchange rate is
more than 700 bolivars for a US dollar (five-six times more than that in the black
market, which probably reflects the true state of affairs), the increase in the
people’s salaries will probably enable them to buy one extra grape.

Here is the situation, then. According to International
Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2016, Venezuela, after years of Socialist rule, had a
negative growth of 8%; the inflation was touching 500%; and one fifth of
the country’s population had no jobs. The government has not made any economic
data available in the last three years (no doubt for good reasons) but the
Central Bank of Venezuela has announced that the country has less than $ 11 billion
in foreign reserves left, and is leaden with debt of $ 7.4 billion. And, if one
is inclined to blame the current unfolding disaster on America and Capitalists
(I don’t know how this will be done, but I am sure it will be done; the
Socialists have special talent for blaming America for all of their mis-deeds
and incompetence), let me advise you that during the Chávez years, when the
money was flowing into the country, Venezuela was the worst performer in the
Americas with GDP growth per capita.

On 30th July Madura held rigged elections, which
returned him to power. He is attempting to destroy the power of the parliament,
which is controlled by the opposition. In the December 2015 general elections
the opposition won a landslide victory. All of the parliament’s decisions, since then, have been
overturned by the puppet supreme court, filled with Madura’s cronies. In March 2017
the Supreme Court stripped the national parliament of all its power, which it
redirected to itself. Madura is now in the process of forming a constituent
assembly, which is his latest ploy to supress the will of Venezuelan people and subvert democracy. This assembly, which will have absolute
power, will aim to sustain Madura’s Socialist regime, which is discredited and
has lost all moral authority to govern. Madura, like his mentor, Chávez, is
peddling the tired (and tiresome) argument that the assembly is the only way to
achieve peace, even though there have been daily protests on the streets
against his regime and hundreds have died so far, and—here you have it—to fight
the “economic war” launched against Venezuela by America— the last recourse of
all Socialist dictators, whose relationship with truth is roughly the same as
that between Russia and Ukraine.

In the age-old tradition of dictators (Socialist or otherwise)
Madura has jailed the opposition leaders under trumped up charges. After the
fraudulent election in July 2017, which returned Madura to power, the two top
opposition leaders, who were already under house arrests on charges of—wait for
this—attempting a coup against Madura, were taken to undisclosed military
prisons.

Madura is managing to survive because so far he has the
support of Venezuela’s army. How has he managed it? The Socialist regime has
inducted top army brass into its corrupt regime. Venezuelan army now boasts of 2000
generals (whereas in the past there used to be about 200). Madura has bought the
loyalty of the generals by giving them the rights to control food imports, as
well as control over banks and mining industry. While the ordinary Venezuelans
are paying thousands of bolivars to buy a scrawny chicken (it is
either that or eating candle-wax and imagining it is a cake), the generals are
gobbling wealth like a stadium-full of Indians coming off hunger strike.

After the fraudulent elections and the arrests of the
opposition leaders, America, alarmed, has announced individual sanctions
against dozens of officials of Madura’s corrupt, and increasingly despotic,
regime. President Trump has announced that Madura will be held personally
responsible for the safety and well-being of Venezuela’s opposition leaders,
who have disappeared. This is a promising start, although a little late in the
day—a bit like trying to hire a window-cleaner when the building is on
fire. America, really, should have used more of its diplomatic muscle to kick
Venezuela out of the Organization of American States (OAS). As it happened,
Venezuela managed to hold on to the membership of the organization by the skin
of its teeth, with the support of its ideological allies and some Caribbean
islands to which Venezuela offers cheap oil. What needs to happen next is what
President Trump is supposed to be considering: broad and sweeping sanctions
against Venezuela; banning import of oil from Venezuela into America and
prohibiting American companies from doing business in Venezuela.

There is a Hindu saying: misfortunes and disasters have no
roots. Everything is brought upon by yourself. The mess that is Venezuela today is the result
of years of inept Socialism (this probably is a tautology), which has, as it
invariably does, morphed into dictatorship.

Therein lies a salutary lesson, not least to the people of
the UK, mesmerised by an aging left-winger, who has spent all his political
life embracing terrorist organizations and Communist despots. Beware of the
Pied Piper who sells impossible dreams. There is no such thing as free lunch.
Someone somewhere always pays.

Friday, 14 July 2017

Deborah Moggach is a
prolific British novelist who has published seventeen novels. Her 2004 novel, The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel was made into a film a few years ago.

I haven’t seen the
film and the only reason I picked up the novel from the local library was
because I was looking for some light entertainment after finishing Howard
Jacobson’s collection of articles in The Independent, published under the
title Whatever It Is , I Don’t Like It. I liked Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
a lot, and found it very funny, too; but, at the same time it was “heavy”
entertainment (I don’t know a better way of putting it).

I was looking to read
something which wouldn’t tax my brain cells, something I could read
without really having to take in the nuances (because there are no nuances),
without the need to pay much attention to the plot (because there is either no
plot or it is not incidental), and the sentences flowed easily enough without
being too clever.

The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel seemed to fulfil the requirements. The blurb
described it as an “addictive comedy”, “a glorious romp”, and “warm, wise and
funny”. I was a bit concerned that one review, according to the novel’s blurb,
found it “deeply poignant”; however, since that review was from Daily
Mail, I thought I could safely ignore it. On an impulse I borrowed
another Moggach novel, The Heartbreak Hotel, which,
according to the blurb was all the things The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel was,
and some more.

Did The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel live up to my expectations? Well, yes,
although, as mentioned above, the bar was not exactly set high in this
instance.

The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel tells the story of a bunch of old biddies from
different parts of the UK who are shipped off to an Old People’s Home in
Bangalore, India, except that the chancers who have cooked up this scheme are
calling it the eponymous hotel so that the old codgers can deceive themselves
that they are on some sort of extended, indefinite even, vacation, and not a
retirement home. The brains behind this scheme are an Indian doctor named Ravi
Kapoor, a consultant in the increasingly overstretched NHS (no stereotype here)
and his cousin, Sonny, a wheeler-dealer businessman from Bangalore who has his
fingers in more pies than Dawn French can eat in a whole year. Kapoor has
migrated to England because he hates India. Why does he hate India? Because
India suffocates him. He is now a doctor in the NHS. During the day he takes
abuse from the patients who don’t want to be treated by a darkie, and in the
evenings he listens to Mozart. He is married to Pauline who works at a travel
agent, and hates his father-in-law, who is more randy than a Billy goat and has been
kicked out of every possible retirement home in the South of England because of lecherous behaviour which shows no signs of diminishing despite the
advancing years. The father-in-law, Norman, is camping in Kapoor’s house and is
making his life a misery. So Kapoor in the company of his enterprising cousin
(which is one way of describing him), Sonny, opens a retirement home in
Bangalore in a ramshackle bungalow owned by a Zoroastrian and his chiropodist
wife who is impossible to please. In due course the “exotic hotel” is full of
British geriatrics, who, for a variety of reasons, have decided that
Bangalore, India, is where they want to spend their last days.It is a diverse collection. There is Norman
the lecher; the obligatory bigot (who, I am pleased to inform, is slowly won over by India’s charms); an
over-the-top couple that gets on your nerves five minutes before you have met
them; a woman who—would you believe it?—was born in Bangalore in the days of
the Raj and had visited the Merigold Hotel—because it was a school—every day
till the age of eight when her parents cruelly uprooted and sent her to a
boarding school in England (which must have done something right because the
woman became a successful BBC producer); and a genteel, middle class lady
called Evelyn, whose children would rather send her to India than find her a
decent retirement home in England (with its enchanting smells of boiled cabbage
and stale urine). As the story
progresses (narrated mainly through the eyes of Evelyn) there are the expected
twists, coincidences, reunions, people falling in and out of love, and—am I
forgetting anything?— unexpected deaths (responsible, I guess, for the
poignancy detected by a critic).

Moggach leaves nothing
to chance, and packs the novel with clichés about India. The beggars, the
crowds, the call centres and the oh-so-well-behaved young men and women who
work there and make futile attempts to pass themselves off as Bobs and Marys
from Enfield to their British customers, the unfathomable serenity and
passivity of Hinduism that enables people to lead their terrible lives without
complaining, the mysticism, the exoticism of India—you name it and Moggach has
supplied it in the novel. The portrayal of India, or, of one of its sprawling
metropolises to be exact, is, despite all the clichés, compassionate. One does
not expect icy objectivity in novels such as this, but neither does, to her
credit, Moggach allow the novel to swoon in saccharine emotions. Well, just a
bit, not too much.

On her official
website Moggach says that The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel came
out of her reflections on getting older, about what is going to happen to us
all. She wanted to explore questions of race and mortality but also wanted it
to be a comedy of manners between East and West. The novel doesn’t offer any
insight into how Indians view mortality, unless the sayings from various Hindu
and Buddhist sacred books quoted at the beginning of each chapter (and which
have no connection with the contents of the chapters) are supposed to provide
the reader with insight into the Hindu way of understanding mortality. What the
reader gets is the British approach to mortality (denial, self-pity,
bitterness), only that these people are gathered in a crumbling old bungalow in
Bangalore instead os a miserable retirement home in Dulwich.

I give The
Best Exotic Merigold Hotel A minus for vocabulary, B + for efforts, and
C minus for entertainment.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.